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The Claim

A 2018 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) study found that false stories spread six times faster than true stories on Twitter and were retweeted 70% more often.

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The Short Version

The claim is well supported by the 2018 Science study and accurate summaries from MIT and Reuters. The study found false news was about 70% more likely to be retweeted and that truth took roughly six times as long as falsehood to reach 1,500 people on Twitter. The "six times faster" phrasing is shorthand for that specific diffusion benchmark.

Caveats

  • The six-times figure refers to a specific metric: time to reach 1,500 people, not every possible definition of "spreads faster."
  • The study examined Twitter data from 2006-2017; it does not automatically generalize to all platforms or later periods.
  • The paper studied labeled true and false news stories, so shorthand phrases like "facts" versus "fake news" can oversimplify the underlying categories.

The Receipts

  1. The spread of true and false news online

    Science

  2. Study: On Twitter, false news travels faster than true stories

    MIT News

  3. Frequently Asked Questions — The Spread of True and False Information Online

    MIT Media Lab

  4. False news spreads widely and easily - MIT Sloan

    MIT Sloan

  5. Factbox: False news spreads faster than the truth on Twitter, study finds

    Reuters

  6. MIT Sloan research about social media, misinformation, and elections

    MIT Sloan

  7. Study: False news spreads faster than the truth

    MIT Sloan

  8. THE SPREAD OF TRUE AND FALSE NEWS ONLINE

    MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy

  9. Fake news spreads faster than true news on Twitter — thanks to people, not bots

    Science

  10. False news 70 percent more likely to spread on Twitter

    Reuters

+ 9 more sources — see the full list on Lenz

Filed Under

Massachusetts Institute Of TechnologyScienceTwitter

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